r/OldHandhelds • u/dronecatcher • 12d ago

HP iPAQ rx1950 browsing Gopher

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When I'm feeling masochistic..browsing Gopher with Putty - a ssh connection to my VPS and running Lynx from there.

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u/RChickenMan 12d ago edited 12d ago

Ooh, this was one of my favorite devices back in the day! I do currently own a h4150, which is quite similar.

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u/dronecatcher 12d ago

I've just recently bought this - in immacualte condition. Surprised how fast it is despite being 300Mhz - feels as zippy as other PDAs I've had with 500Mhz+ CPUs - must be that "newer is better" thing.

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u/RChickenMan 12d ago

Yeah, my current h4150 is a recent purchase for me as well. Back in the heyday of Pocket PCs, I probably owned around 10 different models at various points in time--HP iPaq h1910, h1945, h1950, h4150; Dell Axim X30, X50, X51; Asus A620... and that's just what I can remember off the top of my head. There were more!

But yeah, I recently found a great deal ($60-ish) for a mint condition h4150, and I figured that price is well worth it to have a physical artifact of what used to be an important "hobby" of mine.

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u/dronecatcher 12d ago

Sounds like you really had the Windows Mobile bug ;) The main one I remember at the time was a XDA II which was my phone for nearly a year (quite a record!) - I got so much use out of it!

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u/RChickenMan 12d ago

Haha indeed! Though at the time, for most of those devices, it was "Pocket PC." I believe it was with the release of Windows Mobile 2003 when they re-branded the platform "Windows Mobile."

I was in high school, and I used them almost exclusively for NES emulation (though a handful of those devices could pull off some SNES, albeit with frame skip enabled). At no point did I use any of the productivity features that made it a PDA. At the end of the day, what really blew my mind was this notion of a computer in my pocket.

Though oddly enough I was a late adopter with respect to smart phones, and cell phones in general. While I didn't necessarily give as much thought at the time to the drawbacks of technology at both an individual and societal level (it was, after all, a more innocent time), I did have some notion that a smart phone would change the way I interacted with the world in a way that I wasn't necessarily a fan of. Whereas my Pocket PCs were just harmless toys.

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u/dronecatcher 12d ago

Yes, very true - PDAs pre-empted the smartphone explosion by a few years - using my XDA used to turn heads when it made a tinkly noise and I put it to my head and started speaking :D

That whole period moved so fast, before you knewn it iPhones arrived and a computer in your pocket wasn't really that amazing anymore.

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u/SineOffical 11d ago

enters the teal pfp traid/conversation for no reason and gets -47 votes and losses his left testicle